Harmony Korine’s tripped-out “Spring Breakers” doesn’t outright condemn the youth culture it skewers, or approach it from a safe, ironic distance. This film — a work of polarizing brazenness, bracing satire and startling nightmarishness — wallows in it, as its opening montage, a compilation of youths baring breasts and drinking to excess set to dubstep, shows immediately. This is the Platonic ideal of spring break, it says, a situation where you can do damage to your body and who knows what property during a sanctioned week of partying and sexual debauchery, and then head back to your life as if nothing happened. But “Spring Breakers” is the story of taking the party too far, of four college girls whose pursuit of hedonism and pleasure for its own sake leads them to something dangerously close to sociopathy.

Selena Gomez, Ashley Benson, Rachel Korine and Vanessa Hudgens star as the four friends who rob a restaurant to fund their trip to St. Petersburg, Fla., to party, end up being arrested and fall under the spell of Alien (James Franco), a magnetic, dangerous local criminal with aspirations toward being a Tony Montana type at any price. The allure of the criminal lifestyle and the nonstop partying proves repellent to some of the girls and too much to resist for others, and “Spring Breakers” goes in a decidedly darker direction than you’d expect, turning into, essentially, a day-glo nightmare.

Korine’s filmmaking, accompanied by a droning score from Cliff Martinez and dubstep maven Skrillex, and an off-kilter editing that repeats scenes and lines, almost as a remix of an electronic song might, provide a unique energy. And the performances, especially from the Oscar-worthy Franco, avoiding stereotype and bringing a sleazy humanity to a tough part, are terrific. “Spring Breakers” is an art film through a gangster “Girls Gone Wild” prism, but if you can get with its weird rhythm, it’s one of the best films of 2013 so far. $21.98 DVD, $27.99 Blu-ray.

“THE HOST”

Andrew Niccol wrote “The Truman Show” and wrote and directed “Gattaca,” two masterful pieces of science fiction from the late ’90s, so he’s no slouch when it comes to this sort of filmmaking. Yet “The Host,” adapted from a novel by “Twilight” author Stephenie Meyer, is so inept on every fundamental level of storytelling, it’s hard to believe it came from the same person who displayed such good judgment in those works. Maybe its problems stem entirely from the source material, but then again, Niccol should have known that a novel in which most of the conflict is literally internal, between two characters inhabiting the same body and largely communicating through thought, would not easily translate to film without being unintentionally hilarious.

Indeed, the talented Oscar- nominated actress Saorsie Ronan can’t pull this off, and it isn’t her fault; a full half of her lines are communicated in silly voiceover. Ronan stars as Melanie, one of the few surviving free humans in the wake of an alien invasion in which the invaders have inhabited the bodies of most of humanity. Melanie is captured, and a being that identifies itself as Wanderer is transplanted into her brain. But while Wanderer controls her body, Melanie is still inside, an arguing force who guides Wanderer to reconnect with the other rebel survivors, including Melanie’s boyfriend (Max Irons), another tempting young fellow (Jake Abel) and Melanie’s uncle (William Hurt). There is naturally some consternation about an alien being in their midst, but this attempt at conflict is brushed aside because Wanderer — and, indeed, most of the aliens — are just pretty nice folks.

Most of the film is dedicated to the love triangle that springs up between Melanie/Wanderer and the two young men (and maybe it’s just me, but these two actors are so blandly handsome as to be literally indistinguishable from one another), depicted in breathless solemnity that will either put you to sleep or make you laugh till … well, till you fall asleep, as there’s in the end just no getting around the tedium in which “The Host” wallows. $29.98 DVD, $34.98 Blu-ray.

“TYLER PERRY’S TEMPTATION: CONFESSIONS OF A MARRIAGE COUNSELOR”

I’ve found some of Tyler Perry’s past movies to be goofy and unrelatable, but this newest film from the writer- director, “Temptation: Confessions of a Marriage Counselor,” might just take the cake. A ham-fisted, judgmental morality tale that stretches on interminably from laughable scene to laughable scene, “Temptation” is a goofy disaster. And while I’ve attributed my dislike of some of Perry’s past movies to cultural disconnect — frankly, he’s not making movies for me; he’s making movies for a largely African-American Christian audience — this is one I have no trouble outright condemning as terrible, no matter what your background is.

“Temptation” stars Jurnee Smolett-Bell as Judith, a young employee of a matchmaking agency (owned by Vanessa Williams, here sporting a silly French accent) whose marriage to her longtime sweetheart (Lance Gross) has grown stale. The temptation referred to in the title comes in the form of Harley (Robbie Jones), a charming social media entrepreneur (as one character says, “the third-biggest since Zuckerberg,” which means less than it appears to mean) with a bunch of money and an appealing dark side. Will Judith give into the temptation and wreck her life in the process?

The deck is stacked against subtlety and humanity in Perry’s parable, which has the tact of a Jack Chick tract in its message against walking the straight and narrow and its shocking impulse to condemn those who don’t. As if that weren’t bad enough, Perry gives Kim Kardashian a significant supporting role, in which she comes across as slightly less human than the female co-star of “Lars and the Real Girl.” Avoid this mess. $29.95 DVD, $39.99 Blu-ray.

“ADMISSION”

Not even Tina Fey and Paul Rudd, two considerable, charming comic talents, can save the moribund, soapy “Admission,” a movie that has no pulse to quicken and never gets off the ground. That’s despite what on paper should have worked as perhaps a silly comedy featuring Fey playing a subversion of her Liz Lemon character from “30 Rock,” here as a Princeton University admissions officer whose personal and professional life fall into chaos in the course of a few weeks. Instead, we get a disappointingly standard-issue melodrama with comedic elements. Director Paul Weitz is more than capable of mixing comedy and drama, as he did in his excellent 2002 feature “About a Boy,” but where that film succeeded, this one substitutes contrivance and inconsistency in its characters.

Fey stars as Portia Nathan, a seemingly in-control professional thrown by the revelation of her longtime boyfriend’s infidelity, the stress of a looming competitive promotion at work and, most shockingly, the head (Rudd) of a new school who comes to her with the surprising news that one of his students (Nat Wolff) is the son she gave up for adoption in high school. Through all these issues, Portia must work to determine what’s most important to her, while trying to connect with this young man and, even at the expense of her job, help him achieve his goal of admittance to Princeton. This is a lot of incident, sure, but getting through the runtime of “Admission,” distended as it is, is something of a slog, a whole lot of misery and life lessons and personal growth by barely defined characters that we feel we should care about thanks to the likeable performers inhabiting those roles, but we don’t. It’s a tough call, but “Admission” is just never really enjoyable. $29.98 DVD, $34.98 Blu-ray.

“DEAD MAN DOWN”

Colin Farrell, Noomi Rapace and Terrence Howard give it their all in “Dead Man Down,” but can’t quite get the pulse pounding in this morose neo-noir slog, a thriller that doesn’t thrill and expects its audience to accept some extremely silly things with a straight face over the course of an unearned two-hour runtime.

Ostensibly a film noir romance set in crimeland, it stars Farrell as a low-level soldier for a crime lord (Howard), whose life he saves at the film’s beginning, gaining his trust. But the crime lord is receiving menacing letters and pieces of a photograph from some unknown threat, prompting paranoia not only within his organization but in many of New York’s other crime families. Meanwhile, Farrell is captivated by his neighbor (Rapace), a woman disfigured in a car accident who attempts to blackmail Farrell into murdering the man who injured her. But not all is as it seems, though “Dead Man Down” certainly takes its time getting to a twist that most people will assume from the beginning, if not from just reading the synopsis above.

The performances from the three leads and supporting turns from Dominic Cooper and F. Murray Abraham are not bad, but director Niels Arden Oplev (the original “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo”) drags down a plot with the potential to be fun by hewing to dark-toned gritty mise en scene and a slack pace that results in major portions of the film just being awfully boring. It’s hard to be invested in a romantic story when it feels dictated unnaturally by the requirements of the plot, as a means to move from point A to point B rather than as an organic expression of what two well-rounded characters might do. When you aren’t invested, those scenes drag, and no matter how much sporadic gunplay punctuates things, it’s all sound and fury signifying nothing. And that’s “Dead Man Down” in a nutshell. $26.99 DVD, $35.99 Blu-ray.

“THE GATEKEEPERS”

The heads of the Shin Bet, Israel’s internal security service, have since the Six-Day War in 1967 been on the forefront of making tough decisions regarding the occupation of the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, and monitoring terrorist activity within those areas. The surviving former heads have never been interviewed about these tough decisions until the remarkable new documentary “The Gatekeepers,” a nominee for best documentary feature at the most recent Academy Awards. It’s a film that may have the power to recontextualize what you think about the conflict between Israel and the Palestinian Authority, and brings to life the history of the conflict, the attempts at peace and the state of the country through the words of these six men.

Presented as a series of interviews cut with reconstructed animations, photos and archival video footage a la something like Errol Morris’s “The Fog of War,” “The Gatekeepers” takes viewers through the history of the conflict, from the Six-Day War and the start of the occupation through terrorist attacks, failed and successful assassinations on both sides that led only to an entrenchment of terrorist thought, and the culture of fear and militarization they have come to despair of in Israel.

The interviews are stark; the men reveal in surprising levels of detail and candor some of the concessions they made to traditional notions of morality and justice in the name of protection and security, and, by film’s end, surprisingly object to the policies their own actions helped propagate. I don’t know that “The Gatekeepers” will change any minds, but as an object of recent history, it’s an important work that provokes thought on one’s own opinions about wars on terror and the illusory success that comes with the concessions we make for them. $30.99 DVD, $35.99 Blu-ray.

“WOULD YOU RATHER”

Sometimes even low-budget trashy horror movies have exemplary elements worth recommending, and in the case of “Would You Rather,” a silly thing I liked a good deal more than I expected to like, that element is Jeffrey Combs, a frequent collaborator of Stuart Gordon whom you might know best from “Re-Animator.” In the role of a sinister would-be philanthropist millionaire at the head of a particularly nasty parlor game, Combs both grounds this movie and runs away with it, sinking his teeth into the part and making each line seem particularly delicious. If the film itself seems like it’s a handful of script revisions from being worthy of this performance by the end, well, you still have keep in mind the sort of thing you’re watching and contemplate it without that central performance.

Actually, the lead is Brittany Snow (“Pitch Perfect”), who stars as a young woman who attends the millionaire’s dinner party in the hopes of winning a contest that will provide her with enough money to seek an expensive treatment for her ailing brother. With seven other strangers vying for the prize, the contest turns out to be the old chestnut “would you rather,” in which both options are equally unpleasant and potentially quite painful. When the millionaire’s armed staff arrives, it turns out participation is no longer voluntary.

The film is less a gorefest than a psychological horror film, but of course “Would You Rather” is ludicrous on both counts, and it ends with something of a mean-spirited whimper. Yet it’s nevertheless a cut above thanks to its convincing performances and moments of genuine tension, and as someone who watches an awful lot of low-budget trashy horror movies, I’m happy to find those moments as often as I can. $24.98 DVD, $29.98 Blu-ray.

About This Blog

“SPRING BREAKERS”

Harmony Korine’s tripped-out “Spring Breakers” doesn’t outright condemn the youth culture it skewers, or approach it from a safe, ironic distance. This film — a work of polarizing brazenness, bracing satire and startling nightmarishness — wallows in it, as its opening montage, a compilation of youths baring breasts and drinking to excess set to dubstep, shows immediately. This is the Platonic ideal of spring break, it says, a situation where you can do damage to your body and who knows what property during a sanctioned week of partying and sexual debauchery, and then head back to your life as if nothing happened. But “Spring Breakers” is the story of taking the party too far, of four college girls whose pursuit of hedonism and pleasure for its own sake leads them to something dangerously close to sociopathy.

Selena Gomez, Ashley Benson, Rachel Korine and Vanessa Hudgens star as the four friends who rob a restaurant to fund their trip to St. Petersburg, Fla., to party, end up being arrested and fall under the spell of Alien (James Franco), a magnetic, dangerous local criminal with aspirations toward being a Tony Montana type at any price. The allure of the criminal lifestyle and the nonstop partying proves repellent to some of the girls and too much to resist for others, and “Spring Breakers” goes in a decidedly darker direction than you’d expect, turning into, essentially, a day-glo nightmare.

Korine’s filmmaking, accompanied by a droning score from Cliff Martinez and dubstep maven Skrillex, and an off-kilter editing that repeats scenes and lines, almost as a remix of an electronic song might, provide a unique energy. And the performances, especially from the Oscar-worthy Franco, avoiding stereotype and bringing a sleazy humanity to a tough part, are terrific. “Spring Breakers” is an art film through a gangster “Girls Gone Wild” prism, but if you can get with its weird rhythm, it’s one of the best films of 2013 so far. $21.98 DVD, $27.99 Blu-ray.

“THE HOST”

Andrew Niccol wrote “The Truman Show” and wrote and directed “Gattaca,” two masterful pieces of science fiction from the late ’90s, so he’s no slouch when it comes to this sort of filmmaking. Yet “The Host,” adapted from a novel by “Twilight” author Stephenie Meyer, is so inept on every fundamental level of storytelling, it’s hard to believe it came from the same person who displayed such good judgment in those works. Maybe its problems stem entirely from the source material, but then again, Niccol should have known that a novel in which most of the conflict is literally internal, between two characters inhabiting the same body and largely communicating through thought, would not easily translate to film without being unintentionally hilarious.

Indeed, the talented Oscar- nominated actress Saorsie Ronan can’t pull this off, and it isn’t her fault; a full half of her lines are communicated in silly voiceover. Ronan stars as Melanie, one of the few surviving free humans in the wake of an alien invasion in which the invaders have inhabited the bodies of most of humanity. Melanie is captured, and a being that identifies itself as Wanderer is transplanted into her brain. But while Wanderer controls her body, Melanie is still inside, an arguing force who guides Wanderer to reconnect with the other rebel survivors, including Melanie’s boyfriend (Max Irons), another tempting young fellow (Jake Abel) and Melanie’s uncle (William Hurt). There is naturally some consternation about an alien being in their midst, but this attempt at conflict is brushed aside because Wanderer — and, indeed, most of the aliens — are just pretty nice folks.

Most of the film is dedicated to the love triangle that springs up between Melanie/Wanderer and the two young men (and maybe it’s just me, but these two actors are so blandly handsome as to be literally indistinguishable from one another), depicted in breathless solemnity that will either put you to sleep or make you laugh till … well, till you fall asleep, as there’s in the end just no getting around the tedium in which “The Host” wallows. $29.98 DVD, $34.98 Blu-ray.

“TYLER PERRY’S TEMPTATION: CONFESSIONS OF A MARRIAGE COUNSELOR”

I’ve found some of Tyler Perry’s past movies to be goofy and unrelatable, but this newest film from the writer- director, “Temptation: Confessions of a Marriage Counselor,” might just take the cake. A ham-fisted, judgmental morality tale that stretches on interminably from laughable scene to laughable scene, “Temptation” is a goofy disaster. And while I’ve attributed my dislike of some of Perry’s past movies to cultural disconnect — frankly, he’s not making movies for me; he’s making movies for a largely African-American Christian audience — this is one I have no trouble outright condemning as terrible, no matter what your background is.

“Temptation” stars Jurnee Smolett-Bell as Judith, a young employee of a matchmaking agency (owned by Vanessa Williams, here sporting a silly French accent) whose marriage to her longtime sweetheart (Lance Gross) has grown stale. The temptation referred to in the title comes in the form of Harley (Robbie Jones), a charming social media entrepreneur (as one character says, “the third-biggest since Zuckerberg,” which means less than it appears to mean) with a bunch of money and an appealing dark side. Will Judith give into the temptation and wreck her life in the process?

The deck is stacked against subtlety and humanity in Perry’s parable, which has the tact of a Jack Chick tract in its message against walking the straight and narrow and its shocking impulse to condemn those who don’t. As if that weren’t bad enough, Perry gives Kim Kardashian a significant supporting role, in which she comes across as slightly less human than the female co-star of “Lars and the Real Girl.” Avoid this mess. $29.95 DVD, $39.99 Blu-ray.

“ADMISSION”

Not even Tina Fey and Paul Rudd, two considerable, charming comic talents, can save the moribund, soapy “Admission,” a movie that has no pulse to quicken and never gets off the ground. That’s despite what on paper should have worked as perhaps a silly comedy featuring Fey playing a subversion of her Liz Lemon character from “30 Rock,” here as a Princeton University admissions officer whose personal and professional life fall into chaos in the course of a few weeks. Instead, we get a disappointingly standard-issue melodrama with comedic elements. Director Paul Weitz is more than capable of mixing comedy and drama, as he did in his excellent 2002 feature “About a Boy,” but where that film succeeded, this one substitutes contrivance and inconsistency in its characters.

Fey stars as Portia Nathan, a seemingly in-control professional thrown by the revelation of her longtime boyfriend’s infidelity, the stress of a looming competitive promotion at work and, most shockingly, the head (Rudd) of a new school who comes to her with the surprising news that one of his students (Nat Wolff) is the son she gave up for adoption in high school. Through all these issues, Portia must work to determine what’s most important to her, while trying to connect with this young man and, even at the expense of her job, help him achieve his goal of admittance to Princeton. This is a lot of incident, sure, but getting through the runtime of “Admission,” distended as it is, is something of a slog, a whole lot of misery and life lessons and personal growth by barely defined characters that we feel we should care about thanks to the likeable performers inhabiting those roles, but we don’t. It’s a tough call, but “Admission” is just never really enjoyable. $29.98 DVD, $34.98 Blu-ray.

“DEAD MAN DOWN”

Colin Farrell, Noomi Rapace and Terrence Howard give it their all in “Dead Man Down,” but can’t quite get the pulse pounding in this morose neo-noir slog, a thriller that doesn’t thrill and expects its audience to accept some extremely silly things with a straight face over the course of an unearned two-hour runtime.

Ostensibly a film noir romance set in crimeland, it stars Farrell as a low-level soldier for a crime lord (Howard), whose life he saves at the film’s beginning, gaining his trust. But the crime lord is receiving menacing letters and pieces of a photograph from some unknown threat, prompting paranoia not only within his organization but in many of New York’s other crime families. Meanwhile, Farrell is captivated by his neighbor (Rapace), a woman disfigured in a car accident who attempts to blackmail Farrell into murdering the man who injured her. But not all is as it seems, though “Dead Man Down” certainly takes its time getting to a twist that most people will assume from the beginning, if not from just reading the synopsis above.

The performances from the three leads and supporting turns from Dominic Cooper and F. Murray Abraham are not bad, but director Niels Arden Oplev (the original “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo”) drags down a plot with the potential to be fun by hewing to dark-toned gritty mise en scene and a slack pace that results in major portions of the film just being awfully boring. It’s hard to be invested in a romantic story when it feels dictated unnaturally by the requirements of the plot, as a means to move from point A to point B rather than as an organic expression of what two well-rounded characters might do. When you aren’t invested, those scenes drag, and no matter how much sporadic gunplay punctuates things, it’s all sound and fury signifying nothing. And that’s “Dead Man Down” in a nutshell. $26.99 DVD, $35.99 Blu-ray.

“THE GATEKEEPERS”

The heads of the Shin Bet, Israel’s internal security service, have since the Six-Day War in 1967 been on the forefront of making tough decisions regarding the occupation of the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, and monitoring terrorist activity within those areas. The surviving former heads have never been interviewed about these tough decisions until the remarkable new documentary “The Gatekeepers,” a nominee for best documentary feature at the most recent Academy Awards. It’s a film that may have the power to recontextualize what you think about the conflict between Israel and the Palestinian Authority, and brings to life the history of the conflict, the attempts at peace and the state of the country through the words of these six men.

Presented as a series of interviews cut with reconstructed animations, photos and archival video footage a la something like Errol Morris’s “The Fog of War,” “The Gatekeepers” takes viewers through the history of the conflict, from the Six-Day War and the start of the occupation through terrorist attacks, failed and successful assassinations on both sides that led only to an entrenchment of terrorist thought, and the culture of fear and militarization they have come to despair of in Israel.

The interviews are stark; the men reveal in surprising levels of detail and candor some of the concessions they made to traditional notions of morality and justice in the name of protection and security, and, by film’s end, surprisingly object to the policies their own actions helped propagate. I don’t know that “The Gatekeepers” will change any minds, but as an object of recent history, it’s an important work that provokes thought on one’s own opinions about wars on terror and the illusory success that comes with the concessions we make for them. $30.99 DVD, $35.99 Blu-ray.

“WOULD YOU RATHER”

Sometimes even low-budget trashy horror movies have exemplary elements worth recommending, and in the case of “Would You Rather,” a silly thing I liked a good deal more than I expected to like, that element is Jeffrey Combs, a frequent collaborator of Stuart Gordon whom you might know best from “Re-Animator.” In the role of a sinister would-be philanthropist millionaire at the head of a particularly nasty parlor game, Combs both grounds this movie and runs away with it, sinking his teeth into the part and making each line seem particularly delicious. If the film itself seems like it’s a handful of script revisions from being worthy of this performance by the end, well, you still have keep in mind the sort of thing you’re watching and contemplate it without that central performance.

Actually, the lead is Brittany Snow (“Pitch Perfect”), who stars as a young woman who attends the millionaire’s dinner party in the hopes of winning a contest that will provide her with enough money to seek an expensive treatment for her ailing brother. With seven other strangers vying for the prize, the contest turns out to be the old chestnut “would you rather,” in which both options are equally unpleasant and potentially quite painful. When the millionaire’s armed staff arrives, it turns out participation is no longer voluntary.

The film is less a gorefest than a psychological horror film, but of course “Would You Rather” is ludicrous on both counts, and it ends with something of a mean-spirited whimper. Yet it’s nevertheless a cut above thanks to its convincing performances and moments of genuine tension, and as someone who watches an awful lot of low-budget trashy horror movies, I’m happy to find those moments as often as I can. $24.98 DVD, $29.98 Blu-ray.